In a conventional serializer/deserializer (SerDes) link, a serializer is able to generate a serialized signal for transmission across a channel between a transmitter and a receiver. As a signal is transmitted across the channel, an encoding scheme including transmit symbols is employed. An example of an encoding scheme is a 2-level PAM (PAM-2) scheme, which is referred to as non-return-to-zero or NRZ. For the NRZ scheme, the transmit symbols have normalized signal levels of +1 and −1, which may be represented using a single bit. As data rates increase to meet demand for higher data throughput, multi-bit symbols based on various encoding schemes (e.g., PAM-4) may be used. For the PAM-4 scheme, a transmit symbol may have one of four different values (with normalized signal levels of −3, −1, +1, and +3). While using multi-bit symbols based on encoding schemes such as PAM-4 may increase data rates and bandwidth efficiency, at the receiver side, those multi-bit symbols may require using more power and area in data processing.
Accordingly, it would be desirable and useful to provide an improved way of handling multi-bit symbols based on various encoding schemes (e.g., PAM-4).